Uphill to Stupid: Universality Abounds

All schools and colleges have two great functions: to confer and conceal valuable knowledge.
Mark Twain

Some writers have gained more attention than their ideas merit. It takes little thought to discard them.

Take Karl Marx and his school of thought, for example. In his Communist Manifesto, he wrote, ” Modern bourgeois society… is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world.” Later, in his Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Marx stated, “So far, no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value in …a diamond.” He wants you to believe that the bourgeois economy runs by magic.

Hypernomics knows better. And so do you. A diamond’s value is a function of its carats, color, clarity, and cut. Marx certainly knew of the Hope Diamond and that it was worth more than smaller stones. He was pulling the wool over readers’ eyes. There is not a lick of sorcery in diamond valuations. Thus, his view about diamonds is downhill of stupidity. He was more sinister than that. Instead, he concealed valuable knowledge. This would-be sleight of hand had implications for states that followed his lead.

In 1985, the USSR artificially constrained all salaries to 400 rubles or less per month (Alexeev, Michael V., et al., “Income Distribution in the USSR in the 1980s,” 27 Nov 1992), defying conventional (i.e., non-Marxist) economic wisdom. Doctors made little more than janitors. It made sense to the central planners. And then their economy collapsed—not despite their best efforts, but because of them.

When it comes to Valuing physical products (like a flawless, colorless, round, brilliant two-carat diamond or an Oscar II nuclear cruise missile submarine weighing nearly 15K tons with a top speed of 32 knots) instead of people, there’s no option other than Hypernomics.

In (C) below, the angled plane projects the value of Russian nuclear submarines using performance and price data from 20 and 57 ship classes in the United States and Russia, respectively. The equation used for that surface has a p-value of 9.85E-40. In (B), reflecting the same equation with its step function, the US pays about 60% more for the same tonnage and speed as comparable Russian boats, likely due to factors not considered separately in this equation (such as safety, max depth, comfort, etc.). All navies have behaved like that since they began.

With (A), the US and Russian navies abide by statistically significant but distinctly different Demand Frontiers, each with a p-value of about 0.03. Demand comes not from Marxist rants but from how all buyers purchase goods as their prices change. The slopes may change, but the central tenet does not.

When next you meet a Marxist, tell them the Eastern Bloc buys naval vessels the same way as the West. In other words, they buy like the bourgeoisie. And that is so bourgeois.

Which, despite the would-be disparaging tone, is a good thing.